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Review Summary: Great Book |
Date: 2008-03-27 |
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Details: This is a well written book which explains how Afro-Americans are able to take Marxist ideology and hammer it into a "religion." If this is a religion, what is a political party? Take out the perfunctory lip service to "Christ" and you end up with a nice racist jihad against whitey.
If this guy's theory is valid, all "oppressed" people on this planet are entitled to create their own "religion" to cloak their racial attacks on some other race. Didn't the Nazis say they were oppressed by the WWI allies and the Jews? If only they could have read this book first, they could have called their political party a religion instead. Maybe they coud have called it Nazi Liberation Theology.
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Review Summary: Destroying all America loves |
Date: 2008-10-02 |
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Details: Thanks to the fiery Jeremiah Wright, a lot of people have now heard of Black Liberation Theology. Thanks to the yucky neo-cons, most of them have no idea what it is.
With the American Congress hyperventilating over the problems of the rich with the financial market crash (but NOT responding with similar speed or concern over the problems of the poor), Cone's foundational work has never had so much relevance.
When he said black liberation theology is about "destoying everything America loves," he's not talking, after all, about fried chicken or family reunions. He's talking about our love affair with money, power and self-righteousness.
A book that well deserves its status as a classic. |
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Review Summary: Still a challenging read |
Date: 2006-12-12 |
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Details: Dr. Cone presents a very challenging view of God and the world. In this work, he calls christians to re-evaluate their view of God and of the Christian faith in light of the experience of the oppressed and downtrodden. It uses the language of color in order to illustrate this point, using the color white to stand for evil, oppression, and sin and the color black to stand for the affirmation of our God given potential. This has clearly been informed by his upbringing and life experience. In this work he calls white people to hate their whiteness and embrace their blackness in solidarity with the oppressed. To use Cone's color language, I doubt many would disagree that Christ is clearly black, and all Christians are called to be as well. |
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Review Summary: There is a good reason why this project is doomed to failure |
Date: 2008-03-20 |
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Details: This is a clever attempt to redefine and broaden the white Christian theological tent so that it becomes humane enough to embrace black and other liberation causes of the oppress. It correctly defines northern liberal theology as being independent of black suffering; and southern conservative theology as being defined so that it is compatible with white racism. While all this is trivially true, the larger issue remains unaddressed. It is that Reverend Cone's enterprise cannot succeed because there are larger issues involved that transcend and are prior to theology itself.
The most economical, if not the best way to describe them is by using Ernest Becker's idea of a "hero system." According to Becker, the struggle in life that transcends religion is the struggle for self-esteem. It is this struggle that ultimately gives meaning to life in the current world, not religion or theology per se. All religions, through culture, are put at the service of the meaning developed out of the struggle for self-esteem. The context in which the struggle for self-esteem takes place and thrives is of course as a "Hero System" within the confines of a particular culture.
American Christianity takes place within the confines of and under the control of American racist cultural and social parameters. The job of liberation is to redefine all meaning within such a culture so that the self-esteem project of the oppressed rises to the same level as that of the oppressor, but within a culture defined by the oppressor's self-esteem machinery. In short, even God Himself cannot liberate us from a social hierarchy that, in meaning, is itself logically prior to religion.
The way the Jews liberated themselves from the Egyptians, as well as from other oppressors, remains transparent to the scriptures mainly because what the Jews did transcended the bible and theology itself: They changed the paradigm of oppression so that God himself was redefined: He no longer was an "object" but was an "idea within the head," a "unitary God in the mind," as it were. This paradigm shift went beyond the normal confines of the cultural parameters.
One could argue that this was a conceptual trick that transcends the context of culture and theology, and thus works in a world where the struggle for self-esteem is a superior value to, and that also transcends and is logically prior to, religion and theology.
Absorbing this broad notion is of course a tricky proposition for religious people working within the context of a culture not of their own making. This remains the case even for a religious scholar as brilliant and as learned as professor Cone and his colleagues at the Union Theological Seminary. One of my heroes (also a graduate of the Union Theological Seminary) the illustrative Professor Cornel West has tried to finesse this very point by declaring himself a "Chekovian Christian." It is of course an obvious attempt to do exactly what Professor Cone is trying to do here: "Side step" the fact that American white theology is designed specifically for the needs of the white ego and self-esteem machine. In short, white Christianity is a part of the "racist white male hero system."
All attempts to redefine it, and thus to define a healthy self-respecting liberation black theology under this racist tent is doomed to failure for the reasons stated above. Liberation is work that must proceed from above culture, within the conscious mind of the oppressed. It is work that only the oppressed can do for itself. It is not an appeal that can be made from within the depths of an existing hero system. It is system level creative work, not subsystem level creative work.
And while this is a valiant attempt; it can't be pulled off. And in the end it too must fail. But the discussion, which amounts to so much flailing in the dark, does indeed clarify the picture of why it cannot work.
Cone's appeal is to teardown the "false white religious tent" and replace it with a "better more humane black religious tent." But he wants to do so while under the racist white religious tent, and thus in doing so it leaves out the larger issues and the psychological structures upon which all religions are hung: the self-esteem machine, the cultural hero system. Good try. Amen.
And five stars. |
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Review Summary: None are free, until all are free |
Date: 1997-10-31 |
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Details: This book is a "10" in it's dealing with Liberation Theology but Cone deals exclusively with the topic of liberation. Heaven, Hell, the millenium, eschatology, revelation are all ignored. For Cone, Christian Theology means nothing if it doesn't help free the oppressed in America now. The promise of a far off heaven where everything is wonderful does nothing to releive that pain that oppressed Black Americans feel today. He asks if he should stand by and watch the children suffer while telling them to be patient and wait for the promised land. Cone connects Jesus with his plight when he says that God chose to reveal himself as a poor, oppressed Jewish carpenter-not some one wealthy and powerful. He admits his own shortcomings in the preface for not dealing as effectively as he could have with women's and other minorities issues. His focus is freedom for Black America-for this he makes no apologies! |
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out of 15 Reviews
